Walk around a shared workplace and you will see people from other firms hard at work in their private suites or desks. Such office spaces, where companies lease rooms or desks with others, is fast gaining popularity and acceptance among not just start-ups but multinational organisations as well. Here are some reasons why your firm might want to give it a try.
Attracting the millennials
With ‘work-life balance’ being a buzzword among millennial employees today, shared workplaces could be the key to meeting their expectations and retaining them. The convivial atmosphere of a shared workplace fits right into the millennials’ work culture, especially when breakout areas and common pantries are provided to encourage networking opportunities.
Working in close quarters with other companies could also lead to new ideas and create potential collaboration and partnership opportunities. Cloudfare, an American web security firm, for instance, opened its Singapore office in a shared workplace and is considering working with a recruitment firm on the same floor for its expansion plans.
Shared workplaces located in residential areas could also help companies ease the daily commute for some of their employees. The Singapore government, for example, has begun to open a series of Smart Work Centres across the country that will be shared by people from different firms. These are expected to bring the workplace closer to some employees’ homes.
Making dollars and sense
With the proliferation of mobile devices such as mobile phones and laptops, people can now work on the go. Large companies such as Facebook and British newspaper The Guardian are using shared workplaces to set up satellite offices quickly and cost-efficiently, even in other countries, and expand their footprint in prime locations.
By using a shared workplace, companies can also reconfigure their office space according to their needs, for example, by leasing a smaller space at first and then expanding on a temporary basis when necessary. With such flexibility and reduced upfront cost for office space, firms can become more financially secure and agile.
Connecting the dots
With collaboration between companies often a key to success today, a shared workplace literally brings firms closer together to spark that potentially profitable connection. In the United States, for instance, Silicon Valley Bank has rented space at more than a dozen shared workplaces populated by technology start-up firms.
“People literally open the door and say, 'we need to open a bank account’,” Mr Mark Gallagher, who leads the Silicon Valley Bank’s Boston technology practice, told Bloomberg.
Shared workplace, smart office
Keppel Land was one of the first developers to pilot co-working spaces in Singapore with the setting up of Workspace at Keppel Towers in 2015. The objective for this new business initiative is to provide additional product offering to the office market, from single desks to entire floor plates, and from pay-per-use to long leases.
Our new serviced co-office centre, KLOUD is located at Keppel Bay Tower, part of the Harbourfront Office Park. Its waterfront location differentiates us from the competition operating within the Central Business District. The interior design of the centre capitalises on the locational attributes of Keppel Bay as a world-class waterfront precinct, and we are confident we will get tongues wagging with our ‘office apartment’ concept.
The new premium serviced co-office occupies an entire floor in Keppel Bay Tower, taking up almost 18,000 square feet. It will be the first smart serviced co-office centre in Singapore to have its own mobile application.
There will be office suites for two people and more, designated work desks and hot desks, yielding about 273 workstations spread all over. But besides these usual products, our users can look out for some pleasant surprises. We have thought of almost everything to cater to their needs.
Keppel Land also recently unveiled two new smart serviced co-offices in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and Yangon, Myanmar, with a total footprint of about 60,000 sf. KLOUD users can enjoy excellent connectivity to other parts of the cities via the transport nodes available just a stone’s throw away from KLOUD’s centres.
KLOUD Saigon Centre Tower 2 is housed within Keppel Land’s landmark mixed-use development, Saigon Centre, which is strategically located along Le Loi Boulevard, at the heart of HCMC’s CBD in the prime District 1. KLOUD Junction City Tower is located at the office component of the Junction City mixed-use development in downtown Yangon. Users can benefit from a plethora of amenities within Junction City itself.
For more information on KLOUD, click here.